Stores under attack from the 'music licence Gestapo'

At the end of a hard day’s work, shopkeeper David Sleath would listen to the radio while totting up his takings for the day.

The last customer would have left Hudgies Hardware – Sleath’s shop in the picturesque village of Clare, Suffolk – the ‘closed’ sign would be hung up and the door locked and bolted.

Sleath would relax in the back office and listen to the news headlines as has been his habit ever since he left his high-powered banking job in the City and moved to Suffolk eight years ago.

Counter attack: Shopkeeper David Sleath complains about heavy-handed treatment in a row with the Phonographic Performance company

But his modest end-of-the-day ritual
has been ruined after a run-in with the body responsible for music
licensing in Britain. ‘I daren’t even switch on the radio now,’ he
said.

The problem started when he received a
phone call from Phonographic Performance Ltd, one of the bodies that
license the use of recorded music on behalf of thousands of performers
and record companies. Any business wanting to use recorded music in the
course of its work – television and radio stations, online streaming
services and hundreds of thousands of shops, pubs and nightclubs, for
example – must pay for a licence from PPL.

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Sleath has no objections to PPL in
principle – in fact his son Andi is a drummer and Sleath wants him to
benefit from music royalties due to him. However, he says, the way that
PPL went about trying to get him to pay for a licence that he believes
he does not need is unacceptable.

‘Someone from PPL phoned me up to tell me that I needed a licence for playing recorded music in public,’ he said.

‘I told them I didn’t play music in
public – people certainly don’t come to a hardware store for the music –
and thought that would be the end of it. But they phoned up a few days
later anyway and I told them again that I don’t play music in the store.
The only time I put the radio on is in the evening after the store is
closed. At which point they sent me an invoice for £199.’

Sleath refused to pay but to his horror, he was contacted by a debt-collection agency.

‘It was like dealing with the Gestapo, they were so heavy-handed,’ he said.Sleath contacted his local MP, Tim
Yeo, who wrote to PPL, and he has also got his lawyers involved. PPL
offered a discount on his invoice but still insists he needs a licence
at a cost of £100.

‘The whole situation is absolutely
absurd,’ he said. ‘PPL have been targeting lots of local businesses,
even people who work on their own with no members of the public anywhere
near. Many people will just pay up because they feel intimidated.
Businesses have enough to worry about.’Sleath isn’t the only person to find
himself in conflict with PPL. Since the beginning of this year, the
company has launched proceedings in the High Court against almost
200 parties.

Its activities have even been
discussed in Parliament. In a debate in July, MP Margaret Ritchie
described the licensing regime as ‘over-complex and expensive’, adding:
‘The fact that so many businesses are complaining about the high cost of
the licences and the undue strain that it is placing on their finances
indicates that there is a more draconian approach to compliance.’

The Government agreed with an
independent report this year recommending that PPL should be forced by
law to adopt a code of practice for the way it operates.

Legislation is planned for next year
and the Government said it had heard from licensees worried about ‘what
they see as heavy-handed, misleading or unfair practice in charging for
usage of works’.

However, it is unlikely to stop PPL
raising its fees in a move that has enraged the Association of Licensed
Multiple Retailers, which represents pubs and bar owners.

‘PPL is planning to carry out a dawn
raid on the industry and impose significant and unsustainable price
increases,’ said chief executive Nick Bish.

The association claims that PPL is
aiming to increase its prices by between 900 per cent and 4,000 per
cent, which means that a typical bill for a pub would be about £10,000
and a large nightclub chain would have to pay about £17million.

‘One of our members owns a pub which
puts on a disco twice a week and says his bill will go up from £380 to
£10,000 a year, while another, who owns ten pubs, will have to pay
£106,000, up from £10,000,’ said Bish.The most recent accounts for PPL show
that income for distribution to artists surged from £93million to
£124million last year on turnover of £143million and the signs are that
this will continue.

A spokesman for PPL said: ‘We work
very hard to ensure we deliver excellent service to our hundreds and
thousands of customers and are therefore disappointed when any business
is unhappy with their dealings with PPL. We similarly take very
seriously any queries or concerns our customers may have and are
committed to investigating and resolving these appropriately.’

He added: ‘Where there is no public
performance of recorded music by a business, there is no need for a PPL
licence and we would not charge for one.’

As for the planned price rise, PPL
said there were ‘no firm proposals let alone any decisions made’ but
added: ‘Music is a key reason why people go to venues like nightclubs
and it is something they are willing to pay for’.